


Safe Harbor

by JustAnotherWriter (N1ghtshade)



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: AU, Aftermath of Torture, Dark, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23736547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N1ghtshade/pseuds/JustAnotherWriter
Summary: Jack’s memories of the twenty-four hours leading up to the accident that got him medicaled out and Mac lost somewhere in the Afghan desert are a blur. Most of what he knows, he knows from reading and rereading the reports he technically isn’t supposed to have his hands on.
Relationships: Jack Dalton & Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 2016), Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016) & Riley Davis
Comments: 50
Kudos: 87





	Safe Harbor

**Author's Note:**

> This is dark. As in, a lot darker than I expected to get when I started this. I was really evil this time...
> 
> I intended to write an AU working off the premise of the unaired pilot of the first attempt at rebooting the series, where to the best of my knowledge Mac started off as a long-term prisoner of some sort of foreign terror cell. Things changed rather quickly and now we're here...

They’re getting close. Jack can feel it in his bones, and it’s not just the constant faint ache from the pins and screws in his left femur and hip.

Riley laughs at him. “What are you, a Jedi master?” She says when he insists that something is different this time, that he knows they’re on the right track. He’s aware it sounds a little ridiculous. But he hasn’t felt like this since…since before he woke up in a field hospital in Bagram five years ago without his EOD tech.

What happened before that is hazy. Jack’s memories of the twenty-four hours leading up to the accident that got him medicaled out and Mac lost somewhere in the Afghan desert are a blur. Most of what he knows, he knows from reading and rereading the reports he technically isn’t supposed to have his hands on.

It was the fourth call of the day. Jack does remember insisting Mac eat something before they got to this one, it was a bit of a drive. He had taken a protein bar out of his pocket and given it to the kid, and as usual Mac had carefully torn off the wrapper and folded it up, tucking it in a pocket. Jack didn’t joke about that habit anymore, it had literally saved their lives a few weeks before.

The next thing he can genuinely say _he_ remembers is waking up with a splitting headache and a screaming pain in his leg, buried under piles of rubble. Alone.

He pats his pocket, making sure there’s a stash of those bars there. The kind Mac liked, that weren’t just gritty and stiff and nasty, like some of the high-protein stuff available. Bozer always sent them in his care packages, and Jack had memorized the brand. He’s pretty sure when they find the kid, he’s gonna need a lot more than just some protein bars, but a little familiarity might be good. Might help prove Jack is a friend.

He parks the battered stake-back truck in front of a low building, a far cry from the Humvee he had last time he was in-country, and steps out, his bad leg protesting. Stiff and sore after all the driving, sitting still in an uncomfortable seat. Below the knee, only phantom pains bother him, but those are almost as big an inconvenience as the real thing.

“This is where they…where they filmed the videos,” Riley says, her voice shaking a little.

Jack hadn’t known there were videos until Riley found them. Apparently the government had chosen to keep those under wraps. He’d still been in the hospital when they’d circulated on the internet.

He’d followed the progress of the search for talented young EOD tech Angus MacGyver while he was stuck in PT. He watched the kid’s dying grandfather and his best friend Wilt Bozer (finally seeing his tech’s best friend in more than dusty photos) pleading with anyone who would help them, to please do something to get Mac home. A few months later, it was just Bozer in the videos.

He’d had some friends and some strings to pull in the Army, and he’d tried to stay on top of the investigation. But there was only so much that could be released, now that he was no longer active duty. Eventually, he’d been told, sadly but resignedly, that the government was pulling out of the search, that they couldn’t throw more manpower at a failing rescue mission for one soldier, no matter how talented that soldier was.

He’d heard that a dark US agency, DXS or something, had been involved in the search, but pulled out at the same time as the army. Apparently DXS had some serious pull, because when Jack finally got out of PT and asked his closest friend, Desi Nguyen, for one last favor (everything they had on the search for MacGyver), she’d come up dry (the first time he’d seen Dez fail to get what she wanted). The army had handed over all their documents to this mystery organization and been ordered to act like it never happened.

And when Jack tried to contact DXS, he was very politely (and infuriatingly calmly) told to take a hike. That no agency by the name of DXS even existed. The only person who would tell him anything was his old CIA handler Matty Webber. She’d met him one day in a park and handed him a flashdrive with everything the agency had on DXS. They’ve never talked to each other since. It’s not safe.

Finding out the DXS was operating under the cover of a think tank “Directed Executive Solutions” in Los Angeles was only half the battle. Jack was computer-savvy enough to find their website and all the cover propaganda on it, but he certainly wasn’t good enough to get inside their systems.

He was going to have to hire someone to do it. And Jack didn’t feel comfortable just reaching out to any old hacker and asking them to comb through a US government agency’s databases. One, they could get caught. Two, they could double-cross him. There was only one person he trusted to get inside there.

He hadn’t spoken to Riley Davis since he broke up with her mom, but he’d kept in touch with Diane enough to know that Riley was moonlighting as a dark web hacker-for-hire, but only taking jobs she felt were the right thing to do (even if not always the legal thing). Jack had used every bit of tech savvy he had to post a notice on the dark web asking to hire “Artemis37” for a job.

When Riley replied and asked for specifics, Jack told her the truth. That he was trying to break into a government database to open up files on a cold case on a missing soldier. She’d agreed to do it, and he’d hoped she’d be none the wiser. And then he got another message saying she wanted to meet in person.

He wasn’t sure what to expect when he showed up in that Chinese take-out, his cane propped against the table and his bad leg stretched out on the vinyl-covered seat. From the looks of things when the girl with the familiar face under thick dark eyeliner and messy highlighted hair walked through the door and saw the white of his prosthetic between the cuff of his pants and the top of his boots, Riley hadn’t quite been expecting what she got either.

They’d made an interesting pair. Riley in punk style that would have fit in at any Metallica concert, Jack in his worn t-shirt and jeans. He thinks the woman at the counter assumed they were father and daughter. He’d bought them lunch and then taken a look at what Riley had dug up.

Apparently she’d managed to get a pretty good idea who was asking for the favor when she saw Jack’s name show up on Mac’s file as his overwatch, and she’d wanted to be sure. Mac’s file was apparently really well hidden, she’d been intending to charge extra for the hack if Jack wasn’t…well, Jack.

He could tell she was a little hurt that he would go to all this trouble to track down his EOD tech when he’d left her and her mom high and dry all those years ago, but clearly something had made her unwilling to push the subject. And she’d said there was more Jack needed to see, but not there.

They’d driven back to Jack’s apartment so Riley’s roommates wouldn’t show up unannounced, and Riley had opened a file full of videos. At first Jack’s heart had hit his shoes, because most of the terrorist propaganda he’d seen over the years ended with the captured victim shot or beheaded.

But there were a _lot_ of videos.

Riley told him a little of what she’d learned while the files were loading. Mac had been taken not by a terrorist cell, but by a bomb-maker, as far as DXS had been able to determine. The Ghost, the one Mac had been so focused on stopping. The man whose work had killed Alfred Pena, the kid’s CO.

The videos weren’t anti-American terrorist propaganda. They were messages to the Army and DXS to stop looking for Mac. _They wanted him alive because he was the best._

Jack’s smarter than he lets on to most people, he knew that an EOD that good at taking bombs apart would be even better at putting them together. He also knows Mac would rather die than be responsible for killing people.

Riley’s succinct little summary had been helpful, but Jack had insisted he still wanted to see the videos for himself. She’d excused herself to the kitchen when Jack pressed play. Apparently it was too much to go through them a second time.

After the third one Jack could see why. The Ghost started off ‘easy’. Well, relatively speaking. In the first two videos, a man the camera didn’t show, with a voice distorted by some computer trick, told the American government to back off their search, and in the background of the video, a grimy Mac with some bruises on his shoulder and face (probably from the explosion), was beaten and kicked.

The third time, they escalated it to waterboarding. Jack could see the second Mac went from a mentality of trying to be strong and defiant to a mentality of survival. He winced at the rough wet sound of the kid’s breathing audible before the video went black. _Water in the lungs really really sucks._

Jack figures the videos served two purposes. A sort of sick ‘ransom’, a ‘stop looking or else’ message that would be hard to ignore, and a way to punish Mac for refusing to help them. Double duty torture. Jack had wanted to strangle the Ghost with his bare hands.

He sort of felt responsible (a ridiculous thought, seeing as these were made almost a year and a half before) when in the next video Mac was almost hung. The kid’s frantic struggles against the rope tightening around his neck shook Jack to his core.

He’d kept watching, some sort of sick self-flagellation. As Mac was stabbed, burned, shocked, flogged. As the Ghost’s men broke his legs (never his hands or his fingers, those were too valuable to the bastard, and Jack feels sickly grateful for that). He flinched along with Mac as fists connected with ribs hard enough to snap them, as blades left bleeding slashes up and down Mac’s arms and legs, as a cattle prod was jammed into his side and Mac writhed and thrashed on the floor, screaming soundlessly. When the whip snapped and cracked in a familiar cadence and Jack thought of the ranch.

He hadn’t gone home after he was discharged from the Army hospital. He’s not sure he ever could. He thinks the Jack Dalton who lived on that little ranch in Texas, who grew up learning to ride a horse and rope a calf and crack one of those whips, really died when a bomb blew up in the face of him and his EOD tech and a building fell on him. This Jack is someone else entirely.

The last video was dated the day before the search was called off. Jack saw the exact date when the search for Mac ended on the files Riley got her hands on, and he still thinks it’s sick and ironic that it was March 23, 2012, Mac’s twenty-second birthday, when the government decided he was no longer a priority.

When Jack saw the video, he thought he just might be willing to forgive whoever pulled the plug on the operation.

He hasn’t been able to get those images out of his mind since. Mac, naked and tied spread-eagled on the floor, struggling uselessly as he was cruelly and repeatedly raped. The tears cutting clean tracks through the blood and filth on the kid’s face when the camera focused on him. Sobs shaking his skeletal, battered body.

Jack watched until it was over. Then he ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Which was where Riley found him.

“I knew you’d be in here,” was all she said. He knew without asking that she’d done the same thing. Probably taken a long hot shower too, if the dampness in her hair when she walked into the restaurant was any indication. She’d gotten him back on his feet and given him a glass of water. And then told him about the algorithm she was running on the videos.

According to her, they’d been stripped of any and all metadata, and could have been made anywhere, at any time. But Riley is a wizard with her keyboard, and she hoped that by combining them all she could force her algorithms to find connections, matching data points, something, anything.

In the meantime, they’ve hunted the Ghost. With an almost obsessive determination, chasing down every lead, following the man around the globe. Jack started getting worried when he started recognizing what the techs investigating the bombs that showed up were describing.

A paperclip used in a detonator in Cuba. Gum wrappers in a failsafe mechanism in Kiev. The toothpick from a Swiss Army Knife found in a bomb in Bahrain.

Jack can’t say he would blame Mac for giving in. Not after what he saw in those videos. But it makes him even more desperate to put a gun to the Ghost’s head and pull the trigger.

Yesterday, Riley’s search on those videos got something. After sorting through all the data, somehow her programs put enough shreds together to get a location.

They’re four and a half years too late. But it’s all they have.

Jack clears the tumble-down house room by room, checking for both booby-traps and clues. There’s nothing here, at least not that means anything to Jack. He does find the room the videos were made in, and he shudders at the bloodstains on the floor, and the remnants of rat-chewed rope from that sick final video.

Riley, on the other hand, finds something. A piece of what must have been the system the Ghost was using to record video. And according to her, the Ghost must have been using a custom-built rig, because she knows who makes these components.

Tracking down the supplier is the work of a few minutes, thanks to the dark web, and thankfully (for a guy who makes computers for a whole host of disreputable people) DeathKeyStroke (his online moniker, they haven’t been able to pry a real name out of him, and they don’t really need one anyway) keeps excellent digital paper trails. Riley finds a false name, which leads to a shell company, which pings an address in Belfast. Still maybe years too late. But they’ve never discussed stopping. Riley’s hacks-for-hire keep them in enough cash to travel, and Jack’s years of clandestine ops work keep them flying under the radar (often literally, Jack ‘borrows’ a lot of small planes, always leaving them with a note of apology and money to pay for the use of them and the fuel) of the multiple international law enforcement agencies now looking for them.

They’ve been looking for so long. Jack hopes fate and destiny and whatever else the Big Man can come up with will align. He needs them to. It’s only the thought of putting a bullet in the Ghost’s brain (and the knowledge that Riley will be devastated) that keeps him from putting one in his own.

When they bust into the old house in Belfast (Riley’s spent enough time with Jack that she no longer hangs back while he breaches buildings) Jack takes down the guards before they can sound an alarm and moves through the house, relying in the blueprints Riley got from the local records. According to those, the owners of the house built an underground bomb shelter in the 1940s. The perfect place to keep a prisoner.

Jack doesn’t really dare to hope. Hopes have been dashed so many times. So when takes down the guards posted outside and finds the keys to open the heavy door to the shelter, it takes almost a full minute to process the fact that there’s someone curled up a the dark corner. Someone who looks up when Jack shines the light in their direction.

It’s hard to recognize the kid, aside from those sad blue eyes. Five years is a long time, especially for a kid Mac’s age, who Jack thinks was still not really all that much of an adult when they met (he’d looked all of fifteen and far too young to be fighting a war). Still, he’s not in quite as bad of shape as Jack had been imagining, which is scary in and of itself. Mac’s hair is long and shaggy, and he has a scraggly beard. Both hair and beard are rather grimy and look like they’ve been raggedly hacked off with something dull a few times, but they’re not matted with dirt and Jack can’t see evidence of lice or anything else nasty. Mac is thin, not as bad as it was in the last video, but still, Jack can see his bones clearly. _Starving him completely would have been counterproductive, made him too weak to work for them._ Jack is sure Mac hates the fact that he’s been given some reasonably decent care because he’s potentially useful. _Well, maybe he does._ Unless the Mac he knows is too far gone.

Mac is naked, and Jack hopes that’s just because giving him anything would probably have let him find a way out. The room is literally empty of anything that might potentially be useful, Jack can see where shelves were pulled off walls, and metal anchor bolts driven into the stone were sheared off flush with the surface so Mac couldn’t pull them out.

Because of Mac’s lack of clothing, Jack can see all the scars. There are so many more than there should be just given the videos, and Jack shudders at the thought that the Ghost’s cruelty to Mac extended long past what he was allowed to see. Rationally, he knew it would, but he’d been trying to forget that. He’s not sure if it’s better or worse that all the scars he _can_ see look old. Like, if he had to guess, at least two years old. Maybe more.

Mac stares at him, but dully. Like he doesn’t have the energy to be hopeful or startled or happy or even scared. Jack hates that most of all. Mac used to be so full of life. And that’s been taken away from him.

Behind him he hears Riley gasp in shock. He wonders where she was, then remembers vaguely that she’d said she was going to see if she could find any tech. They hadn’t been sure this was where Mac was, and Riley getting her hands on more of the Ghost’s tech was the next step in the plan.

“Mac?” Jack whispers softly, stepping into the room and handing his flashlight to Riley, so his hands are free. “Mac, it’s me, Jack.”

There’s no real response. Just some shivering and that blank stare.

“Carl’s Jr.?”

And that, of all things, gets a reaction.

“Jack.” The voice is a hoarse, breathy whisper, so different from the confident, talk-a-mile-a-minute-about-random-science-things Mac Jack remembers from the Sandbox.

“Yeah, kiddo, it’s me. It’s Jack. We’re gonna get you out of here, okay?”

Mac nods, but his next words cut into Jack’s heart. “I knew someone was going to come for me sooner or later. I’ll confess. To all of them. Just please put me somewhere I’ll be alone.”

* * *

Mac has no idea what day it is. Sometimes he thinks it would be nice to know, to be able to prepare for what he thinks is probably a routine, but he gave up scratching on the walls a long time ago. Probably a year. Maybe two. He doesn’t know.

There’s something happening outside the door. He wonders if they’re coming to hose him down again. He really hates those days, because as much as he’d really hate to go back to those first years of living covered in filth and having to have his hair all cut off twice because of how bad the lice got, he also hates being soaked in chilly water and then left to dry off; it usually takes almost a day because of how dark and cold it is down here. And…those are the good days. Sometimes…

It all depends on whose rotation it is to come down here and take care of him. He thinks last week (well, week, month, whatever) it was the red-haired guy, and he thinks the one with the scar on his eyebrow comes after him. Which means he still has a little time before the one with the shaved head comes back. Which is when things get really bad. If he’s lucky, the man is eager enough to get to business before he cleans Mac up. Otherwise he has to live with more than just the memories for the next few days.

But then again there’s no predicting when the man with the black eyes and the trench coat will show up. Mac doesn’t think that guy is one of the Ghost’s minions, he’s seen them together a few times and they act like they’re on equal footing. He’s been known to show up unannounced at random times. Mac really hates those days. That guy is the most sadistic of the group. Sometimes Mac can’t get off the floor when he’s finished.

The door opens and he forces himself not to flinch. He doesn’t deserve to flinch.

He doesn’t recognize the man standing in the doorway. He’s got a thick burn scar on his jaw below some stubble, and a gun in his hands. _Maybe this is it. Maybe I’m no longer useful._ He’s been waiting for the oblivion of this for a while now, but now that it’s come right down to it his instincts are betraying him, screaming out a primal desire to survive. No matter what he wants, no matter what he deserves.

He can barely hear anything through the roaring in his ears. Until the name ‘Carl’s Jr.’ cuts through the fog. _Only one person ever called me that._

“Jack?”

They sent someone who knew him. That was a smart choice. Of course they sent Jack. _He probably volunteered. Wanted to clear the stain off his name of having been overwatch to an EOD who started_ making _bombs._ He’s sorry he smeared Jack’s reputation and probably dragged it through the mud along with his own.

He’s going to confess. He’s not going to turn this into a trial and a media circus, he can’t do that to Bozer, to Grandpa Harry, if he’s even still around.

“Confess to what?” Jack asks. Which is strange. If the government sent him to bring Mac in, surely they gave Jack a record of all his crimes. Or maybe they’re having a hard time determining which bombs were his and which were the Ghost’s.

“The bombs. The murders.” Mac says. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just please don’t make them take this to a trial. I just want a black site cell by myself, or they can give me a death sentence.” He figures they’ll put him somewhere alone, but he can’t fully count on it, and maybe he should be numb to everything by now but somehow every time he’s raped he feels a little bit deader inside if that’s possible. As if he isn’t already a walking shadow of the person he used to be.

“Mac, what are you talking about? Nothing you’ve done is going to be held against you. We saw the videos.”

Mac almost laughs. Jack doesn’t know him as well as he thinks he does, if he thinks that was enough torture to get Mac to turn his back on everything he believes in. Believed in.

When he’d joined the army he’d been trained to hold up under a lot of pressure. He hated the waterboardings, especially the lung infections that followed, and the whippings were something he’d never expected to actually experience. Worst by far was when the Ghost gave his men permission to use Mac however they wanted, he’d never really expected that being used as a form of torture; but it still wasn’t enough to actually break him.

He’d known the Ghost wouldn’t kill him, at least not until he exhausted every other avenue of persuasion. But it turned out there were fates a lot worse than death, and there were deaths so much worse than Mac’s own.

“There’s some unsolved murders, probably…two years old now, here in Belfast. Two college students. You need to tell the police that the Ghost killed them.”

He sees Jack starting to put the pieces together. He figures he’ll just explain, make sure they have everything laid out so they can decide how responsible he is for those murders too.

“The Ghost tried everything to make me help him, but after a while he just…stopped. I kind of thought he forgot about me, but he didn’t. Being forgotten would have been better.” Mac stops, choking. The memories are still horribly vivid. “He brought a child down here, a girl who looked like she was probably in college. Told me if I didn’t make his bombs, he’d shoot her. I said no, I had to. And he killed her. He came back the next day, same thing, a guy who was wearing a fraternity pin on his shirt.” He forges on, it’s all done, and past, and he can’t feel emotion about it now. He can’t.

“That day I told him I’d do it, but I made a mistake, on purpose. The bomb failed, and he knew it was me, and that night he came down with the same guy and shot him, and then he beat me until I couldn’t get off the floor.”

“Oh Mac.” Jack’s voice is soft, and Mac hates that. He wants Jack to be harsh and angry. Pity is going to make this worse. Mac doesn’t deserve pity. He’s a monster, a criminal, a killer.

“I tried.” He swallows the sob. He hasn’t cried in a long time either. There’s no point. Everything is just numb. “But after he shot the second one he just left the body in here.” He hears Jack’s partner’s choked sob, and he wishes she’d leave, but he doubts she will. She might be the one here to collect the evidence against him. “He just left me here with that boy for three days. He was a medical student, I found his clinical intern ID, he probably wanted to do something heroic with his life. And I got him killed.” Mac feels the unfamiliarity of tears burning his eyes. _Why are you crying? You don’t deserve to cry. You did this._

“I couldn’t sleep, not with those dead eyes staring at me. It was my fault he was dead, and I’m sure that’s the last thing he thought. That I didn’t save him. He asked me to help him. And I let them pull the trigger.” He’s not sure when the tears started running down his face. “After that I helped. I knew what I was doing, I knew people would die, but at least I didn’t have to see them.” His voice breaks, this is more than he’s talked in a while. He stopped talking to himself, it wasn’t very productive. “I wasn’t strong enough to watch that again.”

“I’m so sorry. Mac, I am so sorry you had to make that choice.” Jack’s hands settle something warm around Mac’s shoulders. He doesn’t deserve that comfort but he also feels ashamed that he’s just standing here naked in front of at least one person he doesn’t know, so he pulls the emergency blanket around himself with a shudder.

“The medical student’s name was Michael Flanagan.” Mac memorized the name, burned it into his memory so that if he ever got out, if anyone ever found him, he’d be able to give that boy’s family some closure. “I don’t know who the girl was but she had red hair and grey eyes and a little birthmark on her chin, a red patch under her lip on the left side.” Those faces have haunted his dreams for the past…however long. They’re actually worse than the other dreams.

Jack doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he reaches forward and pulls Mac into a clumsy hug. Mac wants to bury his face in Jack’s shoulder and sob, but he doesn’t deserve to.

“Riles, get in touch with the British authorities. Give them an anonymous tip about those murders.”

 _Anonymous?_ Mac watches the girl, her face looking quite literally bloodless, pull out her phone. _I thought they_ were _the authorities in this case._

“Then find us the quickest way off this damn island.”

Mac’s rather surprised Jack doesn’t cuff his hands behind him as they start climbing the stairs. _Does he really trust me enough not to run off?_ Mac won’t, he deserves justice, he deserves a cold dark cell. He’s used to them, anyway. The sunlight when they reach the ground floor of the house burns his eyes. He hasn’t been up here in over a week, he thinks. He’s pretty sure the Ghost went on a long job. They made a lot of stuff a while ago.

“Where’s the tac team? Where’s the transport?” He asks when Jack starts leading them toward a disturbingly _normal_ rental car.

“No team. Just me and Ri.” Jack says.

“Why did they just send you?”

“No one sent us, bud. I’ve been trying to find you since…well, since I lost you. I’m your overwatch, that’s my job.” Jack sounds so matter of fact.

_I’m definitely dreaming. I’m going to wake up back in that cell. This is not real, there’s no way._

“Listen, we’re not taking you to a prison. We’d probably all end up in one, and believe me, I do not want that,” Riley says, climbing into the back seat. “Did three months for some dumb shit I pulled and got caught for right outta high school.” She sounds a little like Jack. Mac wonders how long they’ve been working together.

He forces the tiny jealous voice that says he wishes he had had time to get that close to Jack back under the surface where it belongs. He doesn’t deserve to be close to anyone. He’s a ruined, broken killer. He needs to be just thrown out on the curb with the rest of the trash blowing around the street. Dumped somewhere for the authorities to find him with a little paper tied around his neck telling them what he’s guilty of, like one of those dog shaming photos Bozer used to get so unreasonably amused by. Then again, Mac would probably need a whole five-subject college ruled notebook of what he’s done.

“I found us a berth on a smuggling ship that’s leaving for Scotland in an hour,” Riley says. “The captain’s got a good reputation for moving cargo and people that need to be kept secret. He won’t drop us at an official port, just on the coast somewhere.”

“Sounds good. How ‘bout it, Mac, Scottish Highlands sound like a good place to get back on your feet?”

Mac shrugs, none of this is really making sense. _Why not?_

“Sure.”

“I mean, technically we’re probably just taking you back to the land of your ancestors, right?” Jack says, and Mac feels the shadow of a smile crease the corners of his dry lips. _Jack is still very much Jack._ But Mac can tell he’s doing that _thing_ , where he avoids serious conversations by saying really weird things.

“Hungry?” Jack reaches into a pocket and pulls out a somewhat squashed protein bar. “Sorry, it’s probably a little stale, they stopped making the pistachio cranberry in this brand last year. But it still says the sell by date is 2018, so I think it’s safe.”

Mac takes the bar, and a bottle of water Riley hands him from the door pocket of the car, and ignores the look on Jack’s face when he tosses both the wrapper from the bar and the empty bottle into a plastic bag of trash behind the seat.

That strange tension doesn’t lift until they’re all three safely sequestered in the secret hold of the ship and it’s out in open water. Riley curls up and falls asleep almost instantly, looking ridiculously comfortable in the cramped space she’s in. Then again, depending on how long she and Jack have been scouring the globe for him, Mac figures she’s slept in worse places.

“What are you doing?” He finally works up the courage to ask Jack.

Jack pulls a handful of paperclips out of his pocket. “My job, kid. I’m supposed to watch your back. And I messed up.”

“You’re supposed to be protecting people. From me, if necessary.” Mac replies, tossing the paperclips back and forth in his hands. It’s been a long time since he made one into anything but a bomb component.

“Well, it doesn’t look to me like you pose a whole lot of threat right now,” Jack says gently, although Mac can sense he was thinking of saying something else. What, Mac doesn’t know. _He can’t possibly have wanted to say that the whole world could go burn and he’d still stand by me._ No one could care that much about someone who became a monster.

“I’m tired,” Mac whispers. He still thinks this is a dream, and while it’s a pretty good dream, he also thinks if it goes on much longer, when he wakes up he’ll start sobbing because it wasn’t real. He doesn’t deserve that.

“I bet you are, bud. We can have a longer conversation later.” Jack seems stilted. There’s a strange tension in his voice, in the way he’s holding himself. Mac doesn’t know why. Mac closes his eyes and lets the rocking of the waves lull him to sleep.

* * *

Jack leans back against the side of the cargo hold and sighs. _I’m really screwed._ He knew whatever they found at the end of the road would be bad. After that last video, he was well aware the Mac he knew wasn’t coming back. Ever.

But this is worse than he imagined. A Mac who sees himself as a killer, a monster. A Mac who endured unspeakable horrors, who held out as long as he could until a life other than his was threatened. A Mac whose genuinely good nature shattered him at the point of having to make a choice that wasn’t a choice at all. Between bad and worse. Jack can’t blame him for making the one he did. He might have made a different one. But he’s not Mac.

Everything he wanted to say to the kid, all the reassurances and the gentleness and comfort, died off in the face of Mac’s cold, stoic acceptance. He was expecting to rescue a broken man. But Mac is beyond broken. He’s been put back together all wrong. And Jack gets the feeling any comfort he tries to offer will be brushed off by a firm insistence that Mac doesn’t deserve to have it.

From his huddle on the floor, Mac whimpers. He flinches and curls up, hands clawing at the sweatshirt and jeans Jack gave him from his own go-bag before they got out of the car. He wonders exactly how long it’s been since the poor kid actually wore clothes. Maybe so long that this is feeling wrong, and he thinks he’s being tied up or restrained somehow.

Jack wants to sob at the thought that Mac’s life has adjusted to such a sick new normal. It’s such a small thing, in the grand scheme of everything, but seeing the kid who was always cold, who used to wear his jacket over his t-shirt to sleep in, even in the Afghan heat, acting like he can’t bear the touch of this cloth against his skin is heartbreaking.

Mac mumbles in his sleep, Jack can’t make out the words. Then he gasps. “Stop. No, please!” It’s only a few words, in that shattered, horribly out of practice voice, but Jack has the feeling he knows all too well what the poor kid is dreaming of. _It haunts my nightmares too Mac._ He’s been watching that awful video play on repeat in his head too many nights out of the last four years.

“Mac, it’s okay. You’re safe.” He says gently. He doesn’t dare touch Mac until the kid wakes up. He’s pretty sure he’ll just get his arm twisted for the trouble.

It takes a lot more talking and a little prodding with one boot before those hazy blue eyes blink open.

“Mac, it’s alright.”

“I’m fine. It’s fine.” Mac says, huddling up again.

Jack has had it. They’re going to have to do this at some point, better now than later. He can tell Riley is making herself scarce in the corner, she knows it’s time too.

“No. You are not _fine, not okay, not a killer, and definitely not a monster._ ” The words pour out of Jack like a dam has broken. “Good God Mac, nothing that happened was your fault. You did the best you could under circumstances I can’t even begin to _imagine_. You survived a living hell.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.” Mac’s voice is still so dull.

“Yes you should have. Because you still have something to do.” Jack reaches down and pulls Mac’s shoulders up so the kid is looking at him. He’s never been all that good at gentle, and besides Mac isn’t really responding to ‘gentle’ anyway. “You want to make this right? You know more about the Ghost and the people he worked with than anyone else. Tell us that and Riley will get it to the right people. But damn it, Mac, stop doing this to yourself! I can’t watch it.” Jack is dimly aware he’s sobbing. _Yeah, this might have been the worst idea in the history of bad ideas and the kid will shut down and hate me forever and never talk again or worse go throw himself off the damn boat._ But Jack thinks _he_ might do that if he has to look at those dead eyes too much longer. “Come back to me, kiddo, please. Stop living in that black hole. You’re not there anymore. You’re with us. You’re with your family. Mac, please, please, _wake the hell up._ ” He looks directly into the kid’s wide eyes. “Please. Son.”

It’s like he hit Mac with a bolt of lightning. And then the kid starts bawling.

He throws himself against Jack’s shoulder, crying what’s probably a good three years (that’s how long Riley said it’s been since the bodies of Michael Flanagan and Theresa Lord were found on the outskirts of Belfast) worth of tears. Jack just holds him while the waves rock the little boat back and forth. From up top the captain is singing, and over Mac’s cries Jack can hear words.

_“Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar, thunderclaps rend the air. Baffled our foes, stand by the shore, follow they will not dare. Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, onward the sailors cry. Carry the lad that’s born to be king, over the sea to Skye.”_

**Author's Note:**

> This might get added onto, I do realize that it isn't fully concluded by any means. But I had to wrap it up at least a little so I could post for Cairo Week...


End file.
